Why? Low coral cover (<5%), high algal biomass, virtually zero disease-free corals, no evident recruitment of scleractinian corals
Crocker Reef (RIP?). One of two offshore field sites in the Upper FL Keys whose orbicellid corals I was tracking. Although this site is pretty devastated (it has even been trolled on Google for being disappointing!), there are still a few healthy corals to be found.
1. This paper corroborates the degraded nature of the habitat with respect to its suitability to serve as a coral restoration site.
2. I used samples for here to train protein-based models for forecasting coral climate resilience, an endeavor that ultimately proved to be moot since the high-temperature-tolerant individuals succumbed to stony coral tissue loss disease.
If you’re interested in the data I collected from this site, check out this file, which includes a manifest of thousands of coral reef photos from this site, its corals, and other reefs in the Florida Keys (some of which being posted elsewhere on this site).
